Virtual R&D - Which path will you take?

Pharma is at a pivotal point in  its evolution. Social, demographic  and economic milieu in which the  industry operates is undergoing huge  changes. These challenges have  been compounded by the dearth of  good new compounds in its pipeline.

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Pharma’s traditional strategy of  placing big bets on a few molecules,  promoting them heavily and turning  them into blockbusters worked well  for shareholders for many years. However, its productivity in the lab  is now plummeting, as it switches its attention from diseases that are  relatively common and easy to treat to  those that are much more complex or unusual. In 2007, the US Food and Drug  Administration (FDA) approved only 19 new molecular entities and biologics – a smaller number than at any time since 1983.

Moreover, the patents on many of the medicines the industry launched in the glory days of the 1990s will expire over the next few years, leaving Big Pharma very exposed. US research frm Sanford C. Bernstein estimates that generic erosion will knock between 2% and 40% off the revenues of the top 10 companies between now and 2015. Worse still, it calculates that only four of the 10 have pipelines containing products suffciently valuable  to offset these losses.

This “innovation defcit” has enormous strategic implications for the industry as a whole. Many pharmaceutical companies need to decide what they want to concentrate on doing and identify the core competencies they will require, a process which may involve exiting from some parts of research and development (R&D). But even those that regard research and development as a core element of their business will have to make fundamental alterations in the way they work. They may, for example, have to focus more heavily on speciality therapies, since most of the diseases for which there are currently no effective medications or cures are not amenable to mass-market treatments, as well as reducing the time and costs involved in researching and developing such medicines to ensure that society can afford them.

We believe that, if the industry is to become more innovative and cut its R&D costs, four features will be vital:

•   A comprehensive understanding of  how the human body works at the molecular level
•   A much better grasp of the pathophysiology of disease (by which we mean the functional changes associated with, or arising from, disease or injury)
•   Greater use of new technologies to  “virtualise” the research process and accelerate clinical development
•   Greater collaboration between the industry, academia, the regulators, governments and healthcare providers.
We shall discuss some of the changes we consider necessary in more detail in the attached report. 

Donwnload free 24 pages report at our Download Section   

• PharmaBrand (03/03/2010)
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